“Please make sure that tomorrow’s headlines don’t read: ‘Toyota finally returns to F1’,” implored the company’s CEO Akio Toyoda as he announced their new tie-up with Haas today.
The Japanese car making giant is back in F1 for the first time since it pulled the plug on its works team at the end of 2009. But its new alliance with Haas is a much more modest engagement with the sport than its previous attempt to the conquer the championship in the noughties.
Toyota’s first spell in F1 yielded no championship hardware but many hard lessons. They quit 15 years ago after eight seasons during which they failed to take even a single grand prix victory.
While few major manufacturers will ever pluck up the money, resources or the courage to compete at the highest level of motorsport as it is, even fewer will have learned quite as many lessons about how difficult it truly is to succeed at that level than Toyota.
As the last millennium was entering its dying years, one of the automotive industry’s true giants was plotting to make the next millennium theirs.
As early as October 1998, Toyota president Hiroshi Okuda went public about the manufacturer’s ambitions to join the world championship. However, on December 22nd 1999, Toyota’s seismic announcement that they had secured an agreement with the FIA to become the 12th entrant in Formula 1 forced the rest of the motorsport world to sit up and take notice.
Through their Germany-based Toyota Motorsport wing, and their factory in Cologne, Toyota had committed to joining fellow manufacturers Ferrari and Jaguar to become only the third full factory outfit in the world championship.
“The timing is right, the feel is right, and we are ready to go,” said Toyota Motorsport’s president Ove Andersson.
Six months later, Toyota laid out their stall. They would build their first car in the spring of 2001, spend an entire year privately testing it, before arriving on the grid in 2002 with 12 months’ of development to be competitive out of the gate. The following March, after the 11 teams on the existing grid had already completed the first two rounds of the championship, Toyota held an extraordinary launch event for their TF101 – a test car – with confirmed race driver Mika Salo and test driver Allan McNish.
Over the next 11 months, Toyota recorded thousands of laps with their test car around Paul Ricard, but also took the TF101 on tour to 11 of the 17…
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